Finding the Thread of the Story

Long before there was the first written word, people looked up at the night sky and sensed that their life on Earth was part of a larger world, a larger story.  Once the rhythmic, circular movements of the sun and stars were charted, the mathematical harmony of that larger story came over time to be called "the music of the spheres" --  circular movements seeming to repeat themselves to eternity. However, in the 20th century, a different but also awesome story emerged from modern astronomers.  It is the story of how our universe began with a Big Bang, leading to the formation of galaxies, to our Sun, then to our planet Earth, and finally to life upon it.

Because that often-repeated narrative has come out of the discoveries of modern science, it seems so scientific, so objective.  Unlike ancient cultures' imaginative creation stories with their own messages to tell, the modern scientifically-based narrative gives the appearance of being just facts, not prejudiced by human desires.  Often overlooked, however, is one critical way in which that modern scientific narrative is unconsciously shaped by a human bias.

Think about it:  Why is that story of our universe, which begins with the Big Bang, always told with life on planet Earth as the outcome of its narrative?  Why is it told as a chain of events leading to the development of planet Earth?  A narrative could be constructed just as scientifically that would lead to planet X in galaxy Y, or to planet Z circling around one of many other suns in a different solar system.  The actual history of the universe is that of countless causes-and-effects scattering throughout the cosmos in innumerable directions.  Multiple chronologies, not just the one that leads to our home planet.

Thus analyzed, that often-repeated narrative about the universe that modern science has made possible reveals itself to be not totally objective.  But that is just as well.  After all, what meaning could it bring to us if we did not follow the thread of the story that leads to life on Earth and even to us?  The scientists who tell our modern story of the universe have thus revealed themselves to be not just scientists but also narrative-makers -- storytellers!  They have thus engaged in an ancient art.

Narratives are not simply an imaginative form of art. They can also be sources of knowledge. We humans can comprehend the world when we isolate threads that form a narrative.  The modern theologian John Haught speaks to this point when he writes:

"For human subjects the world is not experienced, at least in a rich or interesting way, apart from stories....  There is a narrative quality to all of our experience, and it is from stories, whether mythic or historical, that we acquire any sense or reality at all."

Looked at in still another way, one message of modern science's story of the universe is that out of the universe have emerged, of all things, storytellers!

~~~

Has your life been a story?  How?

(The Haught quotation is from Is Nature Enough?

  Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science, by John F. Haught.  © 2006. p. 46.)

Painting the Universe by the Numbers

Some people are clearly better working with words; other people are clearly better with numbers. All of us, however, have to at some point think about the huge universe that surrounds our lives and planet Earth if we want to add a cosmic dimension to our thought.  And modern science's knowledge of the universe cannot be explained without resorting to numbers in some fashion. That is especially true when it comes to talking about the age of the universe.

The human limitation we run into here is that we humans have not evolved with any instinctive need to comprehend the kinds of immense numbers modern astronomy must employ.  For example, I have a ready, physical sense of any number up to ten because of my having ten fingers.  But how do I have a gut sense of what a million is?  I know abstractly that it is 1000 x 1000, but I have a hard time envisioning one thousand of anything repeated a thousand times over.  The difficulty of comprehension is even greater when trying to truly grasp what a billion is.

Thus it is that some metaphor using words becomes handy.  You may have heard of one often-repeated metaphor of the entire age of the universe fitting into a 24-hour clock. Personally, that common model of a 24-hour clock gets me only a little way towards imagining the immensity of the universe's age.  One problem for me with it is that I don't have a mental picture of a clock containing 24 hours.  (Our traditional circular clock-faces only go up to 12.) Also, on clocks the numbers go round and round repetitively -- but the universe's age stretches out in linear fashion far into the past with no repetition.

the universe's timeline as a row of books

A better model for me has been presented by the contemporary Christian evolutionary theologian John Haught.  He uses the model of a set of books on a shelf, something that I, with my literary bent, can more readily imagine.  Haught explains:  "Imagine that you have thirty large volumes.... Each tome is 450 pages long....  Let this set of books represent the scientific story of our 13.7-billion-year-old universe.  The narrative begins with the Big Bang on page 1 of volume 1, but the first twenty-one [of the 30] books show no obvious signs of life at all....  [L]ife doesn't appear until volume 22....  Even then, living organisms do not become particularly interesting... until almost the end of volume 29.  There the famous Cambrian explosion occurs....  Only during the last sixty-five pages of volume 30 [the last volume] does mammalian life begin to flourish....  [M]odern humans do not appear until the bottom of the final page."

With this picture in my mind, one thing in particular stands out:  That immense gap between the beginning of our universe and when life finally emerges out of formerly inorganic molecules.  Although I know it is my human-centered viewpoint, I cannot help but think of that gap as a time of waiting -- the universe working and "waiting" to make life finally appear.  On the other hand, I can look at that relatively short time in which life on Earth has existed and see graphically the power of life itself.  It only required life to finally get started before it could take off, leading to millions of species in a relatively short time.

~~~

Do you have any thoughts about humans' being such a short part of the universe's history?

(The Haught quote is from

 Christianity and Science by John F. Haught, © 2007, p. xii.)

Degrees of Separation

"The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw -- and knew I saw -- 
all things in God, and God in all things.” 

 (Mechthild of Magdeburg, 13th cent.)

"They live in wisdom who see themselves in all and all in them."

(The Bhagavad Gita, 3rd cent, B.C.E.)

In their origins, these quotations, are separated by centuries, by cultures, and by miles of geography.  But they are of the same spirit.  Not too long ago, I recalled these memorable lines because I experienced some difficult communication between myself and a friend, causing us to both feel painfully the inescapable differences in our perspectives.

Quotations similar to these can be found in all of the world's great faith-traditions.  Such reminders of a fundamental unity endure because we humans know all too well how easily two friends, two partners, or two family members can become alienated.  (Not to mention the persistent barriers of nationality, ethnicity, and culture.)

Diagram of 6 degrees of separation

Over the past several years, the phrase "six degrees of separation" has entered our vocabulary. The supposition behind that phrase is that, beginning with any person, a series of six connections of some sort can be drawn linking that person to any other person.  (For example: Am I only six degrees from a movie star, if I include the cities I've lived in, and include someone who went to the movie star's high school?)  I wonder if the popularity of trying to find such 6-link chains may come in part from our living in ever-larger cities, causing us to be surrounded by more and more strangers.

The great mystics, such as the Christian Mechthild of Magdeburg and the author of that quote from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, see the world in a somewhat different way:  They say that if we see more deeply into reality, the number of degrees of separation is zero!

Here is where the critics of mysticism (whether religious or secular critics) are easily confused. Critics frequently dismiss mysticism by saying that mystics are impractical and out of touch with everyday reality.  If taken literally, a mystics claim that all is "one" seems obviously false.  For, after all, I can see with my eyes that there are two people right in front of me.  The mystics, however, lived lives just as real and practical as other people.  The difference was that they came to perceive a hidden unity that made the forms of separation shallow in comparison.

all a part of one universe
(16th-century drawing)

Modern science has put a new twist on this age-old dispute between the mystical and the commonplace viewpoints. Modern science, with its narrative of how our universe was born and evolved to us today, draws an actual, physical chain of links connecting everything  -- alienated people, animals, plants, and the inanimate.  As the contemporary Christian writer Matthew Fox explains:  " [The] very elements of which we are composed were in fact prepared billions of years ago in the stars themselves."

~~~

Do you have some way of handling alienation between you and someone else when it occurs?

(The Mechthild quote is taken from Meditations with Mechtild of Magdeburg, ed. Sue Woodruff, © 1982.  p. 42.)
(The passage [2:55] from The Bhagavad Gita is from the translation of Eknath Easwaran, © 1985.)

(The map of the universe by Thomas Digges is in the Public Domain because it is over 70 yrs. old.)